biography written by akshaya mukul

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Akshay Mukul’s biography of Agyeya is a nuanced journey through the writer’s fascinating life

The biography humanises the subject, expands the empathy of the reader, and turns agyeya’s world into a real, pulsating, and authentic universe for the readers..

Reading Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya , Akshay Mukul’s colossal biography of Agyeya, a stalwart of Hindi Literature, was like entering the fascinating world of my literary forefathers. With Agyeya at the center of this socio-cultural and literary cosmos, I got to see intimate glimpses of so many names I have grown up reading passionately but could never meet in person. Mostly because most of these writers were either dead before I was born or were gone later, while I was still years away from foraying into my own reading journey.

Agyeya’s pulsating universe

Right from Premchand to Jainendra Kumar to Phanishwar Nath Renu to Nemi Chandra Jain to Muktibodh to Shamsher Bahadur Singh to Malayaj to Nirmal Verma and Namvar Singh – anyone who has been of some serious significance in the world of Hindi Literature in the decades around independence is there in the biography. For this reason alone, this 800 pages long epic book is an absolute joy to read. My reading experience was an adventure which has left me elated and in daze.

There are scenes of Hindi giants no less than Hazari Prasad Dwivedi taking walks in flower-gardens with Agyeya, discussing plants with the passion of love. And then there are scenes where despite juggling with his own chaotic work-world, a mature Agyeya is making time for getting the PHD submissions of deadline-distressed younger Hindi writers typed in Allahabad. Not stopping here, he is also then proof-reading those submissions and even arranging for a car to send off the younger writer to Banaras, all for the sake of ensuring a timely submission by a junior.

There are scenes where a very young Agyeya, locked in prison as a undertrial for his rebellion against the British empire, is having dreams with explicit sexual overtones. And he is boldly noting down what Mukul calls ‘his nocturnal fantasies’ – out of all places, on the back of his court documents! There are scenes of long and often poignant, correspondences of Agyeya with an astonishing range of people – from Maithili Sharan Gupt to Muktibodh. The concerns that these letters betray give us a rare glimpse into the worries, delusions, disagreements, insecurities and more than often, into the vulnerabilities that marked the lives of some of the most brilliant minds that shaped India.

It is remarkable details like these through which Mukul humanizes his subject, expands the empathy of the reader and turns Agyeya’s world into a real, pulsating, authentic universe for all of us. A vulnerable universe which was often full of a multitude of ironic contradictions and a few significant triumphs.

With the page count of only notes and references running to 200, Mukul has clearly handled staggering amount of research. One can only imagine the challenges of creating this hefty biography largely out of Agyeya’s papers – a massive ‘twenty trunks, few cartons and two almirahs worth of material’. Though the subject himself is often considered a daunting figure in Hindi literature and the endless sifting through his life-papers might look intimidating to some, but Mukul comes across with flying colours.

He has clearly written the book with passion, I could feel the undercurrent of that passion on the pages while reading the text. But what’s remarkable here is that while being at it, Mukul is able to maintain the dispassion and precision of a surgeon. He is empathetic towards his subject but never goes overboard. He is not only sensitive but obsessed with details, sub-plots and side stories – which eventually proves significant in giving the reader a fleshed out and solid reading experience.

Mukul’s nuanced, subtle and restrained approach also comes into play when he is dealing with the many literary and political battels surrounding Agyeya. Be it the allegations around Agyeya being called a CIA agent or him being painted as a reactionary pro-right intellectual – Mukul meticulously investigates through a maze of papers and busts all the myths – but he is never loud and lets facts do all the talking. What moved me most was the way Mukul treats the women in Agyeya’s life. Santosh, Kripa, Indumati, Kapila and Ila – he is considerate, empathetic and has genuinely listened to all of them via reading their papers as well as their circumstances.

A cautionary tale

While growing up in my regular university days circles, I remember being fed on the spiraling narrative of the almost mystical battle between a progressive pro-people Muktibodh and an individualistic bourgeois Agyeya. I used to feel stifled by this constant stress on choosing a side – even before being given an opportunity to read both writers and make up my own mind. It did not took me long to realize that this was a manufactured battle that the Hindi literary world has been dragging on for decades and was now imposing it on the younger generation as well. I always saw this whole thing as sort of a trap which puts readers (and writers) in camps and hence limit them and the possibilities of relating to and responding to literature.

Hence this biography of Agyeya came to me as – what now feels as the authentic back story of the most historical feud in my own extended (literary) family. After years of living through the torture of seeing this boxing and limiting of the lives and works of my beloved writers – I could finally read a fact-based account of how did all this started, to begin with. It was a relief to know that the two writers themselves were sincere and respectable towards each other for large parts of their lives. The section dealing with Muktibodh’s death in particularly poignant and moved me to tears.

The descriptions of the ideologically divided and emotionally fractured Hindi world were sad to read. The constant fighting and the exchange of blistering letters between numerous important Hindi writers of that era, often left me disappointed. It is true that Agyeya was relentlessly attacked by the ‘progressives’, but more than often, he himself showed little to zero restraint in attacking them back.

I read the biography during a course of one week and throughout felt a weird kind of grief while encountering these otherwise sensitive Hindi poets and writers – fighting bitterly among themselves on the pages. This went on even while India was at the threshold of attaining independence. While the whole country was shaking through waves of violence, Hindi writers were fighting among themselves to decide who was progressive and who was not. In this sense, Mukul has created in this biography what I personally like to call ‘a cautionary tale of what not to do’. For the same reason, this can prove to be a crucial read for younger generations.

The women in Agyeya’s life

Kripa Sen, Agyeya’s secret lover from the 1940s, is one of the many feats of this biography. I connected to Kripa so much that I feel I will carry her with me forever. In the book she comes across as a great lover– and here I am not writing the word ‘great’ in a sense of hyperbole. The lover in Kripa has a Sufi heart and which comes straight from the legacy of Meer and Majnu. She was a remarkable woman with extraordinary capacities for sustaining love and the wounds that one sometimes earns while being in love. Hindi literature should be thankful to Mukul for introducing us to Kripa, who would otherwise have slipped through the pages of History.

The sections dealing with the women in Agyeya’s life had an undercurrent of the impending grief which kept hovering over the love. But here, grief was not only limited to the loss of love. As Mukul puts it, “His (Agyeya’s) relationships with women – each of them talented in her own right – tended to be extractive, whether financially or for creative gain.” His constant infidelity with zero guilt about how he was treating the women in his live was painful to read through.

In his book titled Wagner: The Terrible Man and his Truthful Art , American-Canadian author M Owen Lee addresses the historic literary question we all struggle with – How can a seriously flawed person produce true and great art?

I do not believe in moral judgements as my own ambivalence about these sensitive questions often overwhelms me. But still, even if I take a considerate view, the patriarchal and insensitive approach of Agyeya towards the women in his life remains so glaringly evident on the record now, that it’s impossible to ignore. Here too, the biography is a cautionary tale.

Agyeya, the writer

One of my favorite sections in the biography moves around Agyeya and Phanishwar Nath Renu. The most eminent Hindi novelist from Bihar, Renu’s letters to Agyeya are both tender and poetic. During the 1966 drought in Bihar, Agyeya went to report on the ground along with a young and enthusiastic Renu. Meeting common people and visiting villages while reporting in the good old school manner, the two produced some seminal longform reportage for Dinaman magazine. Agyeya called out the administration for the pathetic situation in the state – but he did not spared the public intellectuals of Bihar too.

The most poignant pages of the biography details the last months and eventual demise of Renu – who passed away in April 1977, right after emergency was lifted. Renu was a passionate critique of emergency and was locked in a jail in Bihar for a long time. Later, when emergency was lifted, he was out on Parole. But despite being gravely sick due to abdominal complications, Renu kept ‘raring to campaign for the opposition’. Constantly in and out of hospital, he wanted to delay his surgery till fresh elections could happen and the new government is formed. But before that, he had to be taken to Patna Medical College where he died at the age of 56. While reading this I was overwhelmed with grief – thinking about how much we all owe to selfless writers and public intellectuals like Renu, who risked their lives to ensure that the democratic values of our constitution are not compromised.

On a biography spree, I finished reading five writer-biographies this year. Among all five, Agyeya’s biography is the one which has least number of pages devoted to the writer’s work in fiction and poetry. Hence the book is fittingly titled The Many Lives of Agyeya . Literature was just one of Agyeya’s many passions. As much as it can, the biography provides deep insights into his works – especially on ‘ Shekhar: Ek Jeevani’ . But more often than not, Agyeya is either planning a new magazine, planning for a weekly, heading a daily newspaper or preparing for one of his incessant foreign travels. Besides taking multiple fellowships and long teaching assignments abroad, lecturing around the world and organizing literary events were his big passion. It’s a surprise, perhaps an educational one too – that despite leading such a multifaceted life, Agyeya was able to write and publish as much as he did.

REMEMBERING AGYEYA: WRITER, REBEL,LOVER, SOLDIER

SOURCE: THE WIRE

A SHORT NOTE BEFORE THE READ

The name ‘AGYEYA’ appeared in various news daily as his biography got penned by Akshaya Mukul. 

Sachchidananda Hirananada Vatsyayan (1911-1987) went by the popular pen name AGYEYA, also known as ‘the unknowable’. 

Born in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh and the son of a renowned archaeologist Hiranand Sastri, he wore many hats. The writer is also credited for pioneering new trends in Hindi poetry, fiction, criticism as well as journalism. Prayogavaad (experimentalism), a movement in modern Hindi Literature; the launch of his own Hindi language weekly ‘Dinaman’; ‘Nayi Kavita’ in Hindi poetry: are all credited to his imaginary output. 

The Indian revolutionary, AGYEYA was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award    (1964), Jnanpith Award (1978) and Golden Wreath Award for poetry. 

Akshaya Mukul’s comprehensive biography sums up multifaceted Agyeya’s life as ‘Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya.’A well-researched colossal biography of 565 pages depicts the controversial Hindi writer as we peep into the darker realities of his personal, political as well as literary life as we enter the body and soul of another individual.  

Book Review | Remembering Agyeya: Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover

For Agyeya, freedom and self-respect were values on which he never compromised. His biography penned by Akshaya Mukul affirms this notion.

Akshaya Mukul has named the comprehensive biography which sums up the various facets of Agyeya’s life as  Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya.  The book has been published by Vintage, a part of the Penguin Group. The book is enormous not merely because it relates a factual, contextual tale of the many lives of a stalwart writer; it is humongous in size as well with a total of 565 pages of the biography and an additional 200 pages or more of reference material.

I believe it is the most thoroughly researched biography ever written of any Hindi litterateur. In fact, rarely has any writer been the subject of a biography of such epic proportions in the wider Indian literature. Mukul spent several years in writing the book and has scoured all possible sources from across the world looking for authentic facts and references.

Such refinement and perseverance are rare in Hindi. Very few biographies meet the standard in terms of authenticity, detail and due diligence to facts and data. Penguin is soon going to publish the Hindi translation of this colossal biography. For almost four decades, Agyeya was a towering figure in modern Hindi literature. He was the most controversial Hindi writer during his lifetime. Countless rumors were spread about his personal life. Akshaya Mukul must have been cognizant of them too. But he has related the story of Agyeya’s life in a very objective manner based on references and documents. His narrative flows like an articulate novel and there is almost no room for boredom or quirks in it.

Another little-known romantic liaison between Agyeya and Kripa Sen is probably Akshaya’s discovery and, therefore, Agyeya has been appropriately designated as a lover in the book’s title. Besides, Agyeya did write some poignant love poems too.

The book contains a detailed account of Agyeya’s early life, his life in prison and his own advocacy of the court case. The arguments and facts presented by Agyeya in his defense gave a glimpse into his future: it was clear that he would challenge social and political norms.

To those who continuously accuse Agyeya of being an aristocrat and of staying away from the masses, the biography explains in detail how the writer had a close association with, for instance, the peasant movement. Later, he, along with Renu, continuously covered the plight of the farmers and the failures of the administration during the Bihar famine.

Agyeya was almost always short of money because he had opted for writing as a profession at a time when most writers in Hindi literature received very little, sometimes even nil, remuneration. Popular novels like  Shekhar  earned him a miniscule amount in royalties from Saraswati Press. Therefore, Agyeya’s insistence on being remunerated for his lectures later in his career makes sense.

It is also worth noting that when he started receiving some money, for instance, from the Jnanpith Award, he ventured to form a trust with twice the prize money and spent it on other writers. Agyeya was probably the first Hindi writer to do so.

Agyeya’s association with the Congress for Cultural Freedom was at the centre of another controversy. While the affiliation is a fact, it is also true that many of the world’s renowned writers at the time had such connections. Earlier, Agyeya had organised a major conference along with progressive writers against fascism. Freedom and self-respect were values on which he never compromised. This biography attests to this notion.

The literature, thought, and ideological pursuit of Agyeya do not prove his pro-Americanism. Moreover, if it was justified to receive financial aid from the then Soviet Union to publish books at cheap prices and to receive the Soviet Land Award, then any American aid should also be justified. Ironically, both the camps were ignoring the Soviet genocide at the time and the US involvement in the subsequent Vietnam and Korea wars and genocide.

The biography also reminds me of a personal incident which I had almost forgotten. My correspondence and communication with Agyeya started when I was 18 years old. During one such correspondence, when he had not even turned 50, Agyeya once expressed his desire to stop writing.

I registered my protest against such a desire and wrote to him that it would be unfortunate and a great loss. I even suggested that Agyeya should publish a new collection of poems and include in it a lengthy essay on his poetic experiences, problems faced by contemporary poets and ‘Nai Kavita’ or modern poetry.

I even dared to write that Nirmal Verma and Raghuveer Sahay were the most authentic representatives of modern fiction ( nai kahani ) and modern poetry at the time. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Agyeya preserved this correspondence while I lost the letters I had received from him.

Another aspect of Agyeya emerges from this biography: his connection and interaction with many active members across generations during his time. He also supported many writers in due course. There have also been controversies regarding writer-camps organised by Vatsal Nidhi. Akshay Mukul has carefully scrutinised them contextually and studied the discussions held.

For decades, many left-wing writers have been condemning the stalwart as right-wing, anti-people, and what not. This biography makes it clear that unlike most leftists, Agyeya spent three years in prison for participating in the freedom movement. He remained associated with minor movements thereafter. He never adopted any pro-government, anti-people stance while he was the editor of  Dinaman  and  Nav Bharat Times . Rather, he was democratic and critical of the government and supported Jayaprakash Narayan in his massive and decisive mass movement.

He shared long dialogues with Muktibodh and in  Naya Prateek  had even condemned the attack on Harishankar Parsai by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh goons.

If one reads this biography with a broad outlook, one will intimately envisage the struggle of Agyeya’s life, his self-respect and dignity as an author, and his authentic, though somewhat obscure, existence.

Ashok Vajpeyi is a well-known Hindi poet-critic and art lover.  

Originally  published  in Hindi, this piece was translated by Nausheen.

READ FURTHER: 

HERE'S AN ANOTHER ARTICLE BY KULDEEP KUMAR FROM THE WIRE

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Journalist-turned-scholar Akshaya Mukul on capturing the many shades of life and times of Agyeya

His new book about Hindi literary giant Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan promises to be a page-turner

Published: Thu 23 Jun 2022, 4:49 PM

Updated: Thu 23 Jun 2022, 10:23 PM

Joydeep Sengupta

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Journalism’s loss is scholarship’s gain. Akshaya Mukul, who worked for some of the leading English dailies in Delhi for over two decades, made his literary debut as a researcher-scholar with Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), which won every major non-fiction award in India on its release, including the Crossword Book Award, Ramnath Goenka Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Atta-Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Award. Mukul is the recipient of the Homi Bhabha, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and the New India Foundation fellowships. He has contributed essays to Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century, edited by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and A Functioning Anarchy?: Essays for Ramachandra Guha, edited by Srinath Raghavan and Nandini Sundar.

Mukul’s new book is about Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan, or ‘Agyeya’, as he was popularly known, and is called Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya, published by Penguin Random House India in July under the Vintage imprint and is currently available on all major e-commerce websites on preorder. Its Hindi language translation, slated for 2023, will be published under the Hind Pocket Books imprint.

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The book delves deep into Agyeya’s journey from being a revolutionary youth to patron-saint of Hindi literature. This story spans landscapes stretching from British jails, an intellectually robust Allahabad and modern-day Delhi to monasteries in Europe, the homes of Agyeya’s friends in the Himalayas, and universities in the US. wknd. spoke with Mukul about his upcoming book.

How did you get down to research on Agyeya and how different was it from that of your first book?

Agyeya has been a part of my reading life since my intermediate university years in Ranchi. The friend who introduced me to Agyeya’s Shekhar: Ek Jiwani could recite passages from her memory. So, I heard Shekhar… before I read the two-part novel. Since the mid-1980s, I keep going back to Agyeya, his novels, poems, essays, travelogues and diaries. In Delhi University, my affection for Agyeya slowed down a bit as I was mostly hooked to poets like Muktibodh, the poet of the dark alleys of heart and Raghuvir Sahay, probably the best chronicler of distortions in democracy. I am a serial monogamist when it comes to poets. I have many favourites and generally avoid ‘who is the best’ game of literature. I also never fell for the Agyeya versus Muktibodh pastime of the Hindi world. I kept returning to Agyeya.

The idea of writing Agyeya’s biography came one evening over coffee at the India International Centre, Delhi. I was meeting Vasudha Dalmia, one of India’s foremost scholars of Hindi literature. Conversation generally veered towards Agyeya and his biography and why a comprehensive account of his life and literature was missing. ‘Why don’t you write?’ she asked me. I agreed and within a few hours she had spoken to writer Ashok Vajpeyi and editor-writer Om Thanvi to help me access massive private papers of Agyeya. Vajpeyi and Thanvi were more than willing and over the next few months, I got the custody of the meticulously kept papers. It had everything that a robust archive should have but still there were gaps and questions. In research, filling these gaps is important. Often the exercise of joining the dots is arduous. In the case of Agyeya, I had to look at the Congress for Cultural Freedom archives in Chicago, his acquaintance James Burnham papers in Stanford and Rockefeller archives in New York. I travelled and took help from research assistants. Even in India, colonial records of his life as a revolutionary were shrouded in multiple myths. I found thousands of pages in the National Archives and Delhi State Archives. Above everything, Agyeya’s own papers are a treasure trove of new facts on his public, private and secret lives. His secret lover Kripa Sen being one of them.

Which is the most captivating part of his biography?

Well, I will be uncomfortable giving it out before the book comes out. Agyeya’s diaries in jail and his recording of dreams, writing and rewriting of Shekhar: Ek Jiwani, his relationships with women, especially Kripa Sen and friends like Balraj Sahni. There is also a great deal on Agyeya’s years in the Indian Army, dealings with the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and his transformation as a messiah of Hindi literature.

What kind of cooperation did you get from his ex-wife Kapila Vatsyayan?

Kapila Vatsyayan was Agyeya’s second wife and niece of his first wife Santosh. The marriage had created scandal but the two survived it and lived well for a few years. But they had a bitter parting. Agyeya was extractive in his relationships with women and left them in a miserable state. He had walked out of marriage, and they never formally got divorced. I had known her for many years. But when I approached her for help in 2016, she heard me out and asked me to read her ‘cognitive biography’. But Agyeya is barely there. I kept trying. At one point, she almost agreed but her health deteriorated. In February 2020, I met her for the last time. She refused. ‘You do not understand love. It does not end with a man walking out of the house,’ she told me. I must point out that the dozen times I met her to convince, Kapilaji was dignified and wished me luck. Thankfully, Agyeya’s papers have enough to recreate the joy and tension of their relationship.

How did the transition from your original publisher Westland to Penguin Random House India happen?

Like Agyeya, this biography had an itinerant existence. It was all set to come out from Westland, a publishing house owned by Amazon. V. Karthika and Ajitha G.S., two of my most favourite editors, were heavily invested in the book and had done everything possible. But a few days before it was to go to the press, Amazon closed Westland. In the uncertainty that followed, Penguin Random House India showed interest and acquired the book. Agyeya has found a new home and Penguin Randon House has given the book all the love and care. Thankfully, Westland has also survived and at some point, I would be working with Ajitha on a book we discussed a few months ago.

What’s the next project?

For the past two years I have been working on a full-length biography of Jayaprakash Narayan. It is part of the India Lives series to be edited by Ramachandra Guha.

[email protected]

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The Life of 'Agyeya' the Unknowable

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Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya.  By Akshaya Mukul. Penguin Random House India, 2022.   

Akshaya Mukul has done us hacks in academia a serious disservice by producing such a meticulous biography of the litterateur Agyeya. He has made extensive use of the Agyeya archive which – unusually for the Hindi literary world - is impressively maintained by the Vatsal Nidhi.

While one must, on the one hand, say unreservedly that Akshaya Mukul’s Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The many lives of Agyeya , is a monumental doorstopper of a book, and sets a demandingly high standard for future academic work, even in Hindi, it is equally important, here, to acknowledge the resources that have been assembled by the Vatsal Nidhi. Without the latter, the biography would have been impossible. Indeed, one hopes that Akshaya Mukul’s biography, and the archival infrastructure on which it rests, will jointly bring about a transformation in the academic culture of the Hindi academic world. As a true pioneer, however, Akshaya Mukul must not expect gratitude, particularly because this labour has been exercised in favour of a writer who was, and continues to be, controversial.

A disclosure

I must also, at the very outset, declare a complicated personal investment in this entire story. (I suppose it must be a function of age, that matters of public discourse should start lapping at the edges of one’s personal life.) What is well-known, and indeed recorded by Mukul, is that the nom de plume – Agyeya – was conferred on Sacchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan by Premchand. Agyeya’s seminal contribution, the first Saptak , was conceived and executed at an improbable and fractious literary commune that was maintained by Sripat Rai, at 14 Hastings Road, Allahabad – and when the commune broke up, after my uncle got married, the crew, including Agyeya, moved to 18 Hastings Road – my present address.

On a more personal note, my very first photograph – as a child sitting in a waste-paper basket - was shot, with prophetic insight, by Agyeya, who enjoyed yet another distinction not acknowledged in Mukul’s title: he was a brilliant photographer. Agyeya and my father, Amrit Rai, were close friends at one time – which is what explains that funny photo. My copy of Agyeya’s collection of Partition short stories, Sharanarthi – oddly, missed by Mukul, who acknowledges it as a book of poems – is inscribed by Agyeya: “ samaan-dharma Amrit ko ”. However, that “dharma” was the cause of the parting of ways between Amrit Rai and Agyeya soon after. And while their relations remained cordial at a personal level, there was a significant amount of public acrimony later. My father was firmly – or well, not so firmly, as was soon to become evident – identified with the Progressive Writers’ Movement, the cultural wing of the Communist Party. Agyeya, on the other hand, was very visibly identified locally with the anti-Progressive literary grouping called Parimal, and nationally, with what was later revealed to be the American-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was an important part of the American effort to redescribe the post-war U.S. effort to dominate the world, as a fight for “freedom and democracy”.

Given Agyeya’s characteristic air of reluctant corporeality, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this biography is the fact that it gives us such a vivid day-to-day sense of the person himself.

As a child growing up in Allahabad, I had occasion to get a close-up, and inevitably somewhat distorted and farcical, view of this cultural cold war. But I must abandon the temptation to slip into personal stuff here, and return to Akshaya Mukul’s biography. Sufficient though to have given due warning that anything I say must be subject to the same scepticism with which one must regard all testimony that has a personal inflection —archives not excluded.

The personality

Akshaya Mukul brings formidable credentials to this biographical task. His work on the Gita Press – The Making of Hindu India – was path-breaking. The fact that he was able to gain access to the archive – indeed, given the state of Hindi publishing, even the fact that there was an archive at all – was remarkable enough. But Mukul brought a rare diligence to the business of mining the archive, and through his labours the vaguely pious monsters who were responsible for the making of Hindu India through administering regular doses of Kalyan, finally acquired a tangible, historical reality. The work under review – Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The many lives of Agyeya – shows that that diligence is but one aspect of the way he works. He has had access not only to the archives of the Vatsal Nidhi, but he has also accessed archives held in foreign libraries including, not least, the archives of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Rockefeller Foundation. There is something else that marks Mukul out from the general run of Hindi biography. This is a quality of honesty, a willingness to lay bare the messy complexities of actual lives, instead of the soporific hagiographies which reduce the “greats” to a monotonous eminence. Mukul’s Agyeya is a glorious and welcome break from this tradition.

[A] vivid personal detail, backed up with archival references ... does a great deal to make the person come alive and step out from the panel where the revered ancestors’ portraits hang...

Given Agyeya’s characteristic air of reluctant corporeality, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this biography is the fact that it gives us such a vivid day-to-day sense of the person himself. His troubled relations with his father; his volatile ideological affiliations; his restless, hustling ambition; his many, and occasionally passionate relationships with sundry women which still have a whiff of narcissism about them. The great puzzle – and perhaps even clue? – might be the ambiguous nature of Agyeya’s sexuality: the ardent relationships on the one hand, on the other, the fact that he was once granted a divorce on grounds of impotence. But, I must confess, even to broach matters like this carries, in the world of Hindi, an air of transgression, of touching on subjects that are taboo – and it is to Mukul’s credit – and, indeed, to the keepers of the archive who did not impose censorship on his use of the materials – that such matters can be thought about at all. And it is this vivid personal detail, backed up with archival references, which does a great deal to make the person come alive and step out from the panel where the revered ancestors’ portraits hang, hidden behind dusty garlands.

Literary achievements

The matter of Agyeya’s literary achievement must, however, be central to literary biography. This cannot be easy because Agyeya’s output, both in terms of volume and variety, is daunting. After all, as Ashok Vajpeyi is quoted as having said a couple of years after Agyeya’s death, no other Hindi writer had mastered so many different forms of writing and creative expression: novelist, poet, travel writer, journalist, editor. Akshaya Mukul gives a very full account – nearly 600 pages of text, 200 pages of references – of Agyeya’s literary achievement. But a critical evaluation of that achievement will perhaps demand a critic of matching ambition. Meanwhile, I will merely touch on some of the questions that will have to be addressed in such an account.

Well, Shekhar: Ek Jivani is something of a holy cow, but irrespective of its qualities as a stand-alone text – I personally find its intense self-absorption less than compelling – Shekhar (and, indeed, the Agyeya of Pratik and the Saptaks ) is a good point at which to open up the question of Hindi’s “modernism”, the attempt to define an aesthetic adequate to its turbulent, troubled time. It is an ongoing struggle and one that was played out in various genres, in various media, famously in painting. It is too important to consign it merely to a struggle between two ideological factions, the Pragativadis and the Prayogvadis. Obviously, the attempt to construct an indigenous modernism cannot remain unaffected by the fact that it inherits colonial confusions, and inhabits the shrill polemical world of the Cold War. Perhaps it is too much to expect Mukul to do all that – but he has whetted our appetite for it.

Akshaya Mukul gives a very full account – nearly 600 pages of text, 200 pages of references – of Agyeya’s literary achievement. But a critical evaluation of that achievement will perhaps demand a critic of matching ambition.

In a critical evaluation of Agyeya the poet, the crucial perspective in my view, would be somewhat different. This has to do with the matter of language, something that has bedevilled Khari Boli poetry from its earliest days – i.e., the early 20th century. I have been pushing people who are far better qualified than I am, to essay an account of the making of modern Hindi poetry as a tense passage between two anxieties. On the one hand, an anxiety to resist the magnetic attraction of the highly developed tradition of Urdu poetry; and on the other hand, to seek to nudge ever closer to Sanskrit poetry, with its highly evolved poetic tradition, its hypnotic consonantal music. This quest is, inevitably, fraught – because the language itself is actually Urdu-near, and Sanskrit-distant – but has a longing for Sanskrit built into its social foundations. Obviously, this farce plays out at several different levels, but an account that focusses strictly on the matter of poetic language would obviously have to take account of Agyeya the poet – with his Sanskritic legacy, and his feel for the music of the dialects. I’m still waiting.

The contribution of Agyeya the journalist – the inventor, really, of the Dinaman style of serious journalism – is, again, too significant to be considered parenthetically. His term as editor was not, really, very long – but it served to create a model of serious public concern which has, unfortunately, rather lapsed at the present time. Still, it nurtured serious talent, and played a formative role in its time. Akshaya Mukul recalls a fascinating incident from around that time, involving one of these people, Raghuvir Sahay. Apparently, Sahay wrote a poem - “Hamari Hindi” - in which he used somewhat indecorous language to describe the parlous state of the so-called, so-fervently desired “rashtrabhasha”. There was a furious backlash. The Hindi purists were horrified and, enamoured of Agyeya’s fluency with the Sanskritic range, called him to act and reprimand. Sahay, who actually regarded Agyeya as a mentor, also turned to him for support. Mukul’s comment is brief: “Agyeya’s response, if he had one, is lost.”

The Congress for Cultural Freedom

No biographical account of Agyeya would be complete without some engagement with the question of Agyeya’s connection with the American cultural machine, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). This was certainly much talked about at the time. In the perpetually cash-starved world of Hindi, there was a sudden influx of dollars. I have little doubt that, mixed in with the ideological stuff, there was a heavy dose of envy on the part of his critics. But it is to Akshaya Mukul’s credit that he does not shy of putting on record the fact that there was also a matter of financial impropriety in which Agyeya was implicated. But while the CCF may have become somewhat wary of entrusting Agyeya with funds, there is a particular American figure with whom Agyeya remained in touch – and sometimes sought favours from. By a bizarre coincidence, this is someone who actually got in touch with me directly after I got the Rhodes Scholarship. Buzzing with dreams of Oxford, I didn’t follow up on the invitation, and the name dropped out of my memory until I chanced upon it here. Apparently, this person, Chadbourne Gilpatric, had come – Mukul writes, “straight from the CIA” - and became a busy functionary of the Rockefeller Foundation, promoting “freedom” in South Asia.

Myth of the Unknowable

I’m afraid that, rather like the biography, even a review runs the risk of becoming over-long. Thus, I can do no more than mention the fact that Agyeya was one of the pioneers who sought to create an awareness about the natural environment, and the dangers it faced from the headless pursuit of vikas . Or to notice the ironic fact that the two iconic figures in the story of Hindi’s modernism, Agyeya and Nirmal Verma, also happen to be the two who were the most cosmopolitan, the most comfortable with “Western” modes of being. Indeed, I would go further to suggest that a significant measure of their charisma in Hindi’s provincial world derived from that global fluency, that whiff of foreign places. But then there is the further fact that both these persons also exhibited, in their late phase, a reaching out towards some “Hindu” cultural themes. Agyeya with his “Janaki yatras” in the period just before the Ayodhya movement took off, and Nirmal with his abstract affinities with anonymous others who, he believed, experienced a civilisational fulfilment that was denied to his alienated self.

Akshaya Mukul has produced a splendid biography, one that will set the standard for serious academic work in Hindi for a long time to come.

There are important differences, of course. Agyeya was the eldest son of the famous classicist and archaeologist, Hiranand Shastri, and had first-hand acquaintance, willy-nilly, with the classical past; Nirmal Verma came to consciousness with Partition refugees in Karol Bagh, and with refugees from communism in post-war Prague. But reviewers are prone to suggesting books that they hope other people will write – and I must desist. Akshaya Mukul has produced a splendid biography, one that will set the standard for serious academic work in Hindi for a long time to come. The polymathic achievement of Agyeya has found a biographer of comparable ambition. Still, I can’t help saying, finally, that over and above his many literary achievements, perhaps the most durable of Agyeya’s creations is the myth of “Agyeya” himself, the famous Unknowable. And in any examination of that cultural phenomenon, Akshaya Mukul’s biography of the Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover will have to be the first stop.

Alok Rai lives in Allahabad, and is resisting moving to Prayagraj.

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Book review: ‘Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya’ by Akshaya Mukul

Written By: Ashutosh Kumar Thakur

| Published on: Feb 1, 2023

The biography of Agyeya – ‘Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya’ by author Akshaya Mukul, which was released in July 2022, chronicles his transformation from “a revolutionary youth to a very controversial patron-saint of Hindi writing.”

In 2015, Akshaya Mukul wrote the multi-award-winning book “Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India.”

Author Akshaya Mukul successfully presented Agyeya’s public, private, and secret lives in the book with no holds barred. It also covers Hindi literature from colonial times to Nehruvian India and beyond. What Akshaya Mukul has done is read and investigate the clues to his life that Agyeya has left behind in his works, giving us a truly unique perspective on a man who contributed tremendously to the world of words and ideas.

Along the way, we get a rare peek into the factionalism and pettiness of the Hindi literary world of the twentieth century, and the wondrous and grand debates which characterized that milieu. The factional battles in the Hindi society and Agyeya’s quest into civilisation are equally as exciting as the era he lived in.

Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan (March 7, 1911 – April 4, 1987), popularly known by his pen name ‘Agyeya’ was a remarkable Indian writer, poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, translator and revolutionary in Hindi language. His monumental novel ‘Shekhar: Ek Jeevani’, widely regarded as his masterpiece, was drawn from his own experiences in prison.  He also pioneered modern trends in Hindi poetry, as well as in fiction, criticism, and journalism. With his unwavering contribution for Hindi, he is regarded as the pioneer of the Prayogavaad (experimentalism) movement in modern Hindi literature.

Son of a renowned archaeologist Hiranand Sastri, Agyeya was born in Kasia, a small town near Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. He took active part in the Indian freedom struggle and spent several years in prison for his revolutionary activities against British colonial rule.

Agyeya, a pioneer of modern Hindi literature, developed a brand-new narrative language that articulated a remarkable poetics of exaggeration, transgression, and sarcasm. How Agyeya edited remarkable the Saptak series which gave rise a new trend in Hindi poetry, known as Nayi Kavita. He also edited several literary journals, and launched his own Hindi language weekly Dinaman, which set new standard and trends in Hindi journalism. Agyeya translated some of his own works, as well as works of some other Indian authors to English along with translated some books of world literature into Hindi . Akshaya Mukul narrated extremely well about the life and work of Agyeya in the book.

‘Shekhar: Ek Jivani’ is an unfinished Hindi-language novel by Agyeya. Published in two parts, with a third part that has yet to see the light of day, ‘Shekhar: Ek Jivani’ is semi-biographical in nature and is considered to be Agyeya’s magnum opus and also considered a unique and landmark work in Hindi literature. The experimental nature of the novel gave it attention, and many critics recognized it as the first psychoanalytical novel of Hindi literature due to its focus on thematising the gap between the external world and internal states.

It is essential to know that Agyeya started writing ‘Shekhar: Ek Jivani’ when he was imprisoned for his rebellious activities against the British colonial government, in particular, for his participation in the attempt to help Bhagat Singh, a leader of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, to escape from jail in 1929. He wrote the first draft of the novel after being arrested, where he contemplated writing about his life before he would be executed. The first part was published after four redrafts, and the second was released in 1944. The third part, which Agyeya said he had written, never appeared.

Akshaya Mukul gave clear and lucid account in the book that Agyeya, had a wonderful understanding of the civilisational roots of the country and was the modern voice of the genius of India. Agyeya had no predecessors in Hindi, and he decided to depart the dominant mode of realism and explore reality in non-realistic, sometimes surrealistic ways. From his revolutionary youth to acquiring the mantle of a (highly controversial) patron saint of Hindi literature, Agyeya’s turbulent life also tells a history of the Hindi literary world and of a new nation-spanning as it does two world wars, Independence and Partition, and the building and fraying of the Nehruvian state. Agyeya firmly believed that language in literature does not merely reflect reality but also, more significantly, creates it. A tireless experimentalist, in fiction, poetry and editing, Agyeya created a larger geography of empathy.

The book ‘ Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya ’ also features a formidable cast of characters: from writers like Premchand, Phanishwarnath Renu, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Josephine Miles to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, revolutionary Chandra Shekhar Azad, and actor Balraj Sahni. And its landscapes stretch from British jails, an intellectually robust Allahabad and modern-day Delhi to monasteries in Europe, the homes of Agyeya’s friends in the Himalayas and universities in the US. This book is a magnificent examination of Agyeya’s civilizational enterprise.

Author Akashaya Mukul looks at the scattered elements of Agyeya’s life as ingredients that went into the making of the writer the book observes and records the influence of Agyeya’s lived experiences, the places he habited, the people he associated with, and the books he read in his stories, poems, and novels.

Based on never-seen-before archival material-including a mammoth trove of private papers, documents of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and colonial records of his years in jail-the book delves deep into the life of the nonconformist poet-novelist. Akshaya Mukul’s comprehensive and unflinching biography is a journey into Agyeya’s public, private and secret lives.

Mukul also reveals Agyeya’s revolutionary life and bomb-making skills, his CIA connection, a secret lover, his intense relationship with a first cousin, the trajectory of his political positions, from following MN Roy to exploring issues dear to the Hindu right, and much more. Agyeya’s journey from a young revolutionary to a patron saint of Hindi literature is extensively explored in the book.

This is a work of intense analysis and considered excavation a contemplation on Agyeya’s oeuvre and its place in world literature. Through this book, readers will get an insider’s look into the life of an eminent writer. Ambitious and scholarly, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover is also an unputdownable, whirlwind of a read.

Book Name: Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya by Akshaya Mukul Published by: Penguin Vintage Book MRP: ₹999.00

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About Ashutosh Kumar Thakur

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based management professional, curator, and literary critic. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Chinmay Tumbe loves to laugh and learn. He is a faculty member in the Economics Area of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the author of India Moving: A History of Migration (2018) and The Age of Pandemics, 1817-1920: How they shaped India and the world (2020)

A seasoned screenwriter renowned for classics like “Drohkaal,” “Ghulam,” “The Legend of Bhagat Singh,” and “Raajneeti,” Mr. Rajabali founded the screenplay writing department at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, in 2004, serving as its Honorary Head for 12 years. Since 2006, he has been the Founder-Head of Screenwriting at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai. Conducting screenwriting workshops and spearheading national conferences, seminars, fellowships, script labs, and contests, he received the prestigious ‘Leading International Teacher’ award from CILECT in 2019 for his contributions to film education.

A celebrated writer and journalist, Mr. Mukul is the award-winning author of “Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015)” and “Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (2022).” The book on Gita Press has won prestigious accolades like the Tata Book Prize and Ramnath Goenka Award. His Agyeya biography won the Kamaladevi Chattaopadhyay NIF Book Prize. With fellowships from New India Foundation, Homi Bhabha, and Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Akshaya has contributed to key literary compilations such as “A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005)”, “Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century”, and “A Functioning Anarchy: Essays for Ramachandra Guha”. Currently, he’s crafting a comprehensive biography of Jayaprakash Narayan. In a two-decade political journalism career, he has made a mark at the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Pioneer, and the Asian Age.

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Akshaya Mukul

Akshaya Mukul is a renowned writer and journalist with over two decades of experience in political journalism. His two books – “Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India” (2015) and “Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya” (2022), have garnered multiple prestigious accolades, including the Tata Book Prize, Ramnath Goenka Award, and Kamaladevi Chattaopadhyay NIF Book Prize. His literary contributions have also extended to compilations such as “A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English”, “Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century,” and “A Functioning Anarchy: Essays for Ramachandra Guha.” And, currently, Mukul is working on a biography of Jayprakash Narayan.

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Agyeya: Being Human

A multi-layered biography of Agyeya, a foundational figure of modern Hindi literature

Agyeya (Illustration: Saurabh Singh)

A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY STANDS at the intersection of many disciples. Language, history, political thought, cultural memory, and human narrative collide within its pages. Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ was a man of many parts, who lived through a seminal period of Hindi litera­ture. He was born on March 7, 1911 and died on April 4, 1987. His biographer Akshaya Mukul describes his birth at an excava­tion site in Kushinagar “in an open space, not far from the spot where the Buddha was believed to have breathed his last.” The word “agyeya,” which he adopted as his pen name means “the unknowable”, and the puzzles, paradoxes and contradictions of his life stand testimony to that.

This vast biography, with its mythic scope and texture, is written with precision and passion. It is ironic, and also ap­propriate, that this first comprehensive biography of the man who was considered a foundational figure of modern Hindi literature, a man whose “stance on language politics bordered on Hindi chauvinism” is written in English. It is also appropri­ate because of the cosmopolitanism of Agyeya’s scholarship, even though he was insistent that “an Indian writer could not successfully write fiction and poetry in the colonizer’s tongue.”

Agyeya grew up in a multilingual environment, as his father had a transferable job with the British government. His first language was in a sense English, and he writes that he used to dream in English. He took pains to ground himself in his neglected mother tongue and affirmed that he had only learnt Hindi by “deliberate effort, in a hostile atmosphere”.

This ambitious biography begins with Alexander Cun­ningham, the first director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the effort to locate the site of the Buddha’s death. Agyeya’s father, Pandit Hirananda Sastri, had been hired by the ASI. By page 11, we encounter the young Sachcha’s precocious talent for poetry. It is at the age of four that he says of a spinning top he plays with “ Nachat hai bhumi ri —O the earth is dancing”. At the age of five he drops out of his convent school after a reprimand by a disciplinarian nun. A rigorous course of home schooling begins, which included English, Hindi, Persian and above all Sanskrit. This early rigorous grounding in classical texts was to provide a firm philosophical base for his later endeavours.

We meet Agyeya in his youthful revolutionary days, when, to quote his prison diaries, he had pledged himself to “the undy­ing flame of a revolutionary ideal”. The political activism led to conspiracies and jail sentences, and the cover of a soap factory to manufacture explosives. This was followed by courtroom dramas, betrayals, and struggles with the harsh realities of the British Raj. However, there was also the intense reading, both revolutionary and romantic, and the growing realisation that he was at heart a writer. Sometime in 1932, Premchand, the leading light of the Progressive Writers’ Association, and editor of the literary journal Hans , encountered Vatsyayan’s stories. They met his rigorous standards; the story did not bear his name; Premchand conferred the pen name “Agyeya”— unknowable—to the byline.

This biography is a dizzying read, a joyous adventure, and as one turns the pages one glimpses Agyeya, as an all too human figure, the frailties and vanities that come with fame and accompany genius

Mukul’s unputdownable book is packed with literary and social history and gives an exhilarating feel of those dark days, which were yet so full of hope and conviction. It follows the pub­lication of Agyeya’s major work and the sure blossoming of his genius. There is also mention of the stalwarts of world literature such as Anatole France, John Galsworthy, Emile Zola etc. We read of Russian literature, European literature, Bangla writing. We read of DH Lawrence, and of the pull of Nicholas Roerich, and the influence and disenchantment with the Chhayavad movement. We haven’t crossed page 100 yet, and there are 650 more to go, including the references, acknowledgements, and index.

How does one review a book like this one? How could one man have compressed so much intensity into a single life? It is a dizzying read, a joyous adventure, and as one turns the pages one glimpses an all too human figure, the frailties and vanities that come with fame, and accompany genius. We read of his time in the British Indian Army, where, forever the shapeshifter, he is now Captain Vatsyayan. We see him through his mar­riages, his affairs, his aspirations, we see him scaling new heights of success, we see him coping with the despondent realities of a writer’s life. We witness all too familiar factions and rivalries between writers. We read of the All India Writers’ Conference, which reached out to a dazzling array of writers across ideologies and political persuasions with a rare generosity of spirit.

We see a language being fired; we see a literature being forged.

It is difficult to judge a writer by his lived life. Agyeya, the unknowable, was a man convinced of his genius. Like many other men of genius (rarely women) he considered himself exempt from the rules. Fidelity and loyalty were not his most abiding qualities. There was his complex relationship with his older cousin Indumati. His brief, loveless first marriage, to Santosh Kashyap, was “a big commitment,” which he could “not fulfil”. The relationships and affairs that preceded and followed it suggest a restless search, for companionship, for romance, for mental and physical stimulation. Mukul has written of Agyeya’s personal and emotional life with depth and discretion. I was par­ticularly moved by the pages that took us to the tender, heartfelt, and yet sparky letters from Kripa Sen, his secret lover in the early 1940s, who was later immortalised as Rekha in Nadi ke Dvip . In his thoughtful introduction, Mukul comments, “His relation­ships with women—each of them talented in her own right— tended to be extractive, whether financially or for creative gain.” Agyeya’s deepest, best known relationships were with the formi­dably beautiful and talented Kapila Vatsyayan, who he married in 1956, and with Ila Dalmia, both muse and amanuensis, who remained with him until the end. Kapila was 27 when he married her, and he 46. She was also the niece of his previous wife, Santosh. She remained his legally wedded wife, although her authorised biography has barely referred to the relationship.

Agyeya met Ila Dalmia sometime in 1967 or 1968. She was 23, and he was about 30 years older. The two decades they spent together were fruitful and creative, with travels across Europe and America, new friends, and incur­sions into new areas of creativity. Mukul comments that Ila Dalmia was “instrumental in burnishing Agyeya’s reputation in his old age”. She was in many ways to become the custodian of his life and legacy.

When Agyeya died, the editorial in the Navbharat Times declared, “a vast silence has fallen over Hindi literature.” The cult around him, and his mystique, flourished after his death, though it is difficult to evaluate his continuing impact on today’s generation and contemporary Hindi writing. A year after Agyeya’s demise, Ila Dalmia published her first novel, which she had been working on for some time. Titled Chhat par Aparna , it was discernibly autobiographical in its theme of a young woman from a wealthy family and her older lover.

Most of the dramatis personae in this multi-layered biography are no longer with us. This resonant narrative is a magnificent work of scholarship, researched with passion and told with detachment. It chronicles an era and links the history of recent Hindi literature with the intellectual life of the nation. It also provides a crucial bridge between the determined insularity of Hindi and the sometimes rootless cosmopolitan­ism of the Indian-English literati—a bridge that Agyeya himself effortlessly crossed and recrossed in his inner life and literary career. The tome contains over 200 pages of notes, primary and secondary references, indexes and acknowledgments. These document the deep friendships, rivalries and discords, the con­cerns and dilemmas, that obsessed a generation that was search­ing for its true voice and identity through a time of transition.

The book opens with Agyeya’s poem ‘ Mujhe Aaj Hasna Hai ’—masterfully translated by Ranjit Hoskote as ‘I Should Laugh Today’. “One day I’ll / be found lying dead by the roadside / and people will keep turning to look and ask by right / Why were we not informed earlier / that there’s still life in him?” (from ‘ Sagar Mudra ’, 1971)

Akshaya Mukul’s epic endeavour proves that there is still life in Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan Agyeya. The embers are still aglow.

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Top Picks from Akshaya Mukul's Book Shelf

Journalist–scholar akshaya mukul is the author of gita press and the making of hindu india (2015) and recipient of the homi bhabha, jawaharlal nehru memorial fund and new india foundation fellowships. his recent book, writer, rebel, soldier, lover: the many lives of agyeya, was released by penguin india last month..

A Life of Picasso:The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943 BY JOHN RICHARDSON, Alfred Knopf, Rs 7,203

This is the last volume of a four-part biography on Picasso, each covering a decade of the artist’s life. Though part of Picasso’s inner circle, Richardson never lets intimacy get in the way of facts.Future biographers can learn how to be critical, do exhaustive research and maintain narrative style from the four volumes.

Duino Elegies BY RAINER MARIA RILKE, TRANSLATED BY VITA AND EDWARDSACKVILLE-WEST, Pushkin Press, Rs 1,241

No other work of Rilke captures his life better or renders his experiences of love,death and solitude more breathtakingly.On its first appearance in 1931, the translation laid to rest the notion that Rilke was a difficult poet and has since become a historical document. Who can forget its opening lines—“Who would give ear,among the angelic host,/Were I to cry aloud? And even if one/Amongst them took me swiftly to his heart,/I should dissolve before his strength of being/For beauty’s nothing but the birth of terror …

”Awesome Nightfall: The Life,Times, And Poetry of Saigyo WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR, Wisdom, Rs 840

LaFleur spent decades studying the life and work of Saigyo, a medieval Japanese warrior-turned-poet monk,whose verses chronicle the violence and beauty, world and transcendence,erotic involvements, political upheaval,warfare and society of Heian era and Shoguns’ rule. LaFleur’s translations bring out Saigyo’s meditative world,the snake-like energy of his syntax.

These Are Not Sweet Girls:Poetry by Latin American Women EDITED BY MARJORIE AGOSIN White Pine Press, Rs 2,966

This is an anthology of astonishing range, from the early 20th century to the present.More than 50 women poets present a world of Latin America, so different,so true. Reading this collection is to understand the range and inventiveness of women’s voices.

Pessoa: A Biography BY RICHARD ZENITH Liveright, Rs 3,080

Having discovered a massive treasure trove of poet Fernando Pessoa’s private papers, Zenith, a Pessoa scholar, compiled this breathtaking biography that recreates Portugal’s dalliance with nationalism, everywhere Pessoa went,his bohemian circle of friends and the poet's spiritual and sexual quests.

Zbigniew Herbert: The Collected Poems 1956–1998 HarperCollins, Rs 1,316

A leader of Poland’s anti-communist movement, Herbert is the chronicler of 20th-century pain. His private and public angst emerges beautifully in this collection. If Mr. Cogito and Imagination is the key to his world, Report from a Besieged City reminds us that the world has changed not a bit from Herbert’s time.

Poems of Nazim Hikmet TRANSLATED BY RANDY BLASING ANDMUTLU KONUK, Persea Books, Rs 1,567

Thirteen years in jail, thirteen years in exile and banned in Turkey for thirty years—and yet Hikmet’s poetry talks of love, hope, the pureness of heart and passion. In these troubled times,Hikmet’s words work like an antidote.

The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Class that Tried to Win the Cold War BY PHILIP OLTERMANN Faber and Faber, Rs 799

When East Germany’s secret policefound verse being used to spread subversive messages, they tried to train theirwriters to weaponize poetry. JournalistOltermann spent five years writing thisgroup biography about the chilling storyof East Germany’s descent into paranoia.

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan Copper Canyon Press, 2007, Rs 1,957

Jordan led many lives—poet, journalist,artist, activist, teacher. In the words of Adrienne Rich: “Her poems are back and forth between manifestoes and love lyrics,jazz poetry and sonnets ... ‘spoken-word’ and meditative solos, with mood-shifts and image-juxtaposition to match.”

Migration BY W. S. MERWIN, Copper Canyon Press, Rs 1,870

This collection of Merwin’s entire oeuvre brings his vision, wisdom, unprecedented range and anger against self-importance in one place. Here is one: “I want to tell what the forests/were like; I will have to speak/in a forgotten language.”

Book prices are subject to change.

Man with Printed Sarong, c. 1933-44, by Lionel Wendt

Art in Focus: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Refugees Performing Exercises, Kurukshetra, India

Is There a Case for Climate Austerity?

Elevator from the Subcontinent, by Gigi Scaria, 2011

Akshaya Mukul and the Life of Agyeya

Agyeya was a writer, a rebel, a soldier, a lover-- and a man who shaped modern Hindi literature. Akshaya Mukul joins Amit Varma in episode 324 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about the life of this remarkable man -- as well as the art of biography and the state of the nation. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Akshaya Mukul on Amazon and Twitter. 2.  Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya  -- Akshaya Mukul. 3.  Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India  -- Akshaya Mukul. 4. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 5. Agyeya on Wikipedia, Amazon, Kavitakosh and Hindwi. 6.  Shekhar: Ek Jeevani  (Hindi) (English) -- Agyeya. 7. Dunning-Kruger Effect. 8. Poker at Lake Wobegon — Amit Varma. 9. Listen, The Internet Has SPACE -- Amit Varma. 10. Siddharth Chowdhury on Amazon. 11.  The Power Broker  — Robert Caro. 12.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities  — Jane Jacobs. 13.  Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing  -- Robert Caro. 14. Robert Caro on Amazon. 15. 

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• Show The Seen and the Unseen - hosted by Amit Varma
• Frequency Updated Weekly
• Published April 10, 2023 at 4:31 AM UTC
• Length 4h 15m
• Episode 324
• Rating Clean

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Aurangzeb, a stranger no more

A historian retells the complex and contested life of the sixth mughal emperor, keeping away from hagiography or undue resurrection.

Updated - March 04, 2017 08:12 pm IST

Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth Audrey Truschke Penguin Random House Rs 399

Among the Mughal rulers, Babur and Aurangzeb are the most popular in social media among Bhakts of an ideology that has been working hard for the last three years to foist Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan as the sole narrative of a country where custom, costume and customary beliefs change every few kilometres. Social media is the new battleground where anyone holding a divergent view is quickly labelled anti-national or aulads (descendants) of Babur and Aurangzeb. Happily aided by the government, Aurangzeb’s name is being defaced from central vistas and who knows even from school textbooks tomorrow.

Therefore, it is interesting that the idea of Audrey Truschke’s magnificent biography of Aurangzeb took seed on Twitter where firmans are made and executed in 140 characters. Fortunately, some firmans , in this case a request to write on Aurangzeb, got implemented through a scholarly work.

Sticking to facts

Coming a year after her magisterial Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court , in Aurangzeb Truschke employs the tools of an ace academic researcher but makes it accessible to everyone through her racy language that never loses sight of facts and history. It is history that has been unkind to Aurangzeb, painting him all in grey, a terrible ruler who undid the legacy of his great-grandfather Akbar, grandfather Jehangir and father Shah Jehan by razing temples and ordering mass murders of Hindus.

Mindful of extreme emotions that Aurangzeb evokes in India today, Truschke keeps herself away from either hagiography or undue resurrection. Rather, she ‘recovers’ Aurangzeb from the heap of fiction and lies. In the process, she does not mince words and challenges the scholarly, the popular and the bazaar versions of the life and reign of the sixth Mughal emperor. Be it Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Pakistani playwright Shahid Nadeem, or Jawaharlal Nehru, Truschke establishes how each viewed Aurangzeb through a flawed lens, overemphasising his religiosity or ‘adherence to Islam’ as reasons why he became what he became. Nehru called him ‘a bigot and an austere puritan.’ Truschke bemoans such sweeping generalisations and points out how this image of a ‘reviled’ Emperor is often used against the Muslims.

Truschke does not lose her way through the complex and contested life of Aurangzeb. Her focus is on facts and she looks at Aurangzeb in a clinical fashion. Yes, he did destroy some Hindu temples and banned Holi but, as she points out, he also gave grants for maintaining temples and liberally donated land to Brahmins. Also, along with Holi, Muharram and Eid too faced action. Most important, Hindu bureaucrats were at the core of the Mughal empire during Aurangzeb, the period when it expanded the most.

Facts are not the only tools with Truschke nor does she indulge in a slanging match with those who revile Aurangzeb. Instead, she chooses a scholarly path of mapping his 50-year rule through three themes that comprehensively sum up the enigma of Aurangzeb: one, imperial bureaucracy; two, why he thought of himself as a moral leader; and three, Aurangzeb’s policies on Hindu and Jain temples. In addition, her racy account of Aurangzeb’s reign looks at all the flashpoints that have gone into the making of his image. For instance, Truschke provides an insight into Aurangzeb’s handling of the so-called Rajput rebellion that, she argues, was more in the nature of a power struggle between the Mughals and Rajputs. Moreover, she establishes that the Rajput themselves were not united in their opposition to Aurangzeb. Also, Aurangzeb was even-handed in meting out punishment to his uncle Shaysta Khan for failing to put up a defence against Shivaji, as to his son Prince Akbar who had rebelled and, aided by a section of Rajputs, declared himself Mughal emperor.

Truschke is unsparing while dealing with the moral world of Aurangzeb, be it conversion of Hindus or destruction of temples like Vishwanath Mandir in Varanasi or of Keshava Deva in Mathura. But she does not fall for the oft-repeated reasons for Aurangzeb’s act. Instead, she asks why most temples were left untouched, especially in South India. Similarly, she points that the ban on alcohol was not specific to Aurangzeb’s reign but merely an extension of what Akbar and Jehangir had done. Not to mention that the policy of prohibition was a big failure.

Minor quibbles

Truschke mildly disappoints while discussing the Hindu bureaucrats in Aurangzeb’s reign. Three leading lights of his court, Raja Raghunatha, Chandar Bhan Brahman and Bhimsen Saxena, are part of her narrative but without the attention they deserve. Much of the criticism against Aurangzeb is based on his alleged anti-Hindu bias, and for a biography that successfully recovers the Mughal emperor for contemporary readers, it would have helped to flesh them out further since most of them were not merely officials but scholars in their own right. Chander Bhan Brahman’s classic historical biography by Rajeev Kinra proves this.

Overall, Aurangzeb is a fascinating biography of an emperor who continues to dominate the contemporary discourse on the Hindu-Muslim relationship and beyond. Strongly recommended for everyone, scholars, students and general readers, Aurangzeb is an example of how historical biographies of complex characters can be written.

The book addresses Aurangzeb’s concern at the time of his death that he came as a stranger and would leave as a stranger. Truschke has helped take away much of that strangeness.

Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth ; Audrey Truschke, Penguin Random House, ₹ 399.

Published - March 04, 2017 05:53 pm IST

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Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya

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